Who's treated themselves to some new hardware recently..?

[williams2]

If the BLUETOOTH standby function is set to ON, the orange CHARGE indicator will remain lit even when the speaker is powered off or has finished charging.

https://www.sony.com/electronics/suppor ... s/00142974

[Grey]

In the last 8 or 9 months, I've been buying 2-3 boxes of Leitz almost every month. The company, judging by the name, is German, but the factory is in China as usual. These are folding boxes made of good cardboard that can be assembled & disassembled. I do not know if there is a "premium" cardboard as they say , but it is good.

As a result, I now have 25 such boxes of different colors & sizes

I decided that not only something can be stored in them.
Make some kind of project. I have a second unused Raspberry Pi 3+, a seven-inch screen, a terabyte hard drive & a special adapter board for it. Well, a couple of speakers & an amplifier.

All this should fit into an A5-sized box. The screen will be in front. Speakers on the sides. Everything else is inside.

Such boxes are easy to handle. Drill, cut with a scalpel... & even pierce with an awl. In addition, it is easy to glue wooden bars inside to install devices.
Well, after the project in a plastic container, it will be easier now

[Grey]

Make some kind of project. I have a second unused Raspberry Pi 3+, a seven-inch screen, a terabyte hard drive & a special adapter board for it. Well, a couple of speakers & an amplifier.

There was a proposal to do all this with an autonomous power supply I looked at the offers in local stores. Most of all I liked the products from Romoss. These are powerbanks.

I noticed that with the same capacity of 40000, there are different designations on the body of the two models. One shows 40 and a small plus sign... this is clearly about the capacity. The second one shows 22.5 and a small electric lightning... this is the power.
The first model has only 18 watts. But the buyer sees only the number 40 The buyer usually wants the capacity and buys the first available model. But power is also important to me.

I found a model with a capacity of 40000 and a power of 65 watts
According to my quick estimates, this is enough for the device to work for 14 hours.
This should be enough to wait until the electrical substation is repaired if someone blows it up

[bigpup]

I finally had a very old motherboard give it up and end it's useful life.

This was in my main computer, that does need to be a little powerful, and work good for playing high end PC games.

Because CPU mounts have gone thru about 10 different update changes, from the type on the old motherboard.
The CPU needed to also be changed, to have one that would work, in the new motherboard, I got.
The old CPU would not mount on it and work.

Got a i7 12700K Intel CPU, mainly because it uses the type mount (LGA 1700) the new motherboard has, but also got it at a very good price, on sale.

Looking in Pup-Sysinfo ->Mainboard ->CPU information.

This CPU has 12 cores with ability for 20 total threads.

Normal speed is 3.6 GHz. Can overclock to 5.0 GHz.

Do you think it will run any Puppy version and give good results?

[TerryH]

Do you think it will run any Puppy version and give good results?

It might be a bit of a strain...better make sure you add plenty of RAM, you'll probably need at least 32GB or maybe 64

[d-pupp]

Do you think it will run any Puppy version and give good results?

Watch out for whiplash

[mikewalsh]

@bigpup :-

Heh. Ooh, I don't know, mate. Looks a bit 'weak' to me, so.....don't expect brilliant performance..!

Might find yourself struggling a bit, but.....ah hell, if anything'll accomodate it, Puppy will!

Mike.

[houndstooth]

I think my monitor is giving out so I may be due.

It's an Acer & I like it so will probably go with another.

Strange problem: It flickers on startup, but once it's on there is no problem. So it's not the computer or the display cable, but the power cable or builtin supply (there's no wall-wart or external converter), and I am not expecting the power cable because it keeps working once it starts up.

I think this is 19" & I don't want much bigger.

It has DVI & VGA, & I use both. I might get HDMI for newer machines, so maybe I can find one with all three.

[houndstooth]

I'm been wanting a USB SD reader, a way to use SD/mSD with any USB port.

At the store I also asked about a network or Bluetooth SD reader & he said, "Those might not exist."

The goal would be small, portable storage for use with any device in spite of os or physical connections.

[bigpup]

I have had one of these USB SD card readers for some time.

Works very well.

There are many you can find that are similar in design and only cost around $10 or less US.

Screenshot(7).jpg (26.04 KiB) Viewed 632 times

[mikewalsh]

This is mine. Only reads standard-size cards, although it can read microSDs with a suitable adapter. Picked it up for £1 in our local 'Pound shop'.....around 16-17 years ago.

Still works well. (The tape round the middle is there because the clear plastic casing began to crack about 7 or 8 years back. It's been on there ever since...)

Mike.

[wizard]

@houndstooth

One useful thing about a SD to USB adapter is full size SD cards and most micro to full SD card adapters have a write protect switch which will allow you to secure the OS. The security of booting from CD/DVD, but faster and you can make changes without needing to reburn a disk.

Here's one of my adapters obtained from Ebay, has USB A, USB micro, micro SD card slot and full size SD card slot. Shown with a SD to micro SD card adapter (adapter has the write protect switch).

wizard

[wizard]

@mikewalsh

Got a red one just like that, but doesn't have the cool tape.

Thanks
wizard

[houndstooth]

If Vanja & other off-brands work for you I'll have a look. Maybe these are a commodity. I've found USB & SD storage themselves are not. I can't get PNY usbflash to work on 64 devices & I can't get Onn (Wal-Mart) SD to work in my 64 machine, so I use it in my old 32. Ironically PNY SD do work in the 64.

I also bought a no-brand HD a while back & it was not worth it.

WD, Toshiba, Seagate, etc. are the way to go.

[mikewalsh]

@houndstooth :-

It's swings & roundabouts, TBH.

So far as the actual storage devices themselves are concerned, yes; you DO want to stick with well-known brandnames.....despite that there are exceptions. For instance, Toshiba HDDs are reliable and work well, but avoid thier older USB 2.0 flash drives like the plague; they are SO slow it's unbelievable (unless the one I had was some kind of 'fake')? And although Crucial make high-quality SSDs, their own SD cards leave something to be desired.....

However, when it comes to the gadgets that enable you to connect many of these devices TO your hardware, the name seems to mean very little these days. For long enough, there's been a few large anonymous manufacturers somewhere in the Far East, who churn out these things by the million.......and 100s, if not 1000s of different firms buy them and stick their own name on them. Yet this is not an issue, because the build-quality of stuff from the Orient has for long enough been the equal of other firms from anywhere in the world......largely due to many Western firms re-locating their manufacturing base to China because of costs. And the Chinese have always been very good at imitation.......along with finally understanding that the West also expects build-quality and reliability.

At one time I would only buy from reputable manufacturers in Europe or the States, because there was a good chance such items would work properly. But experimenting in latter years has taught me that generic, 'badge-engineered' items are just as likely to be equally reliable and long-lasting now, so.......it makes no difference what I buy, or where I buy it from. Price and/or features will be the deciding factors.

Mike.

[houndstooth]

@mikewalsh I see what you mean. Storage technology vs. conversion & transfer devices are a distinction to make. The USB flash I like are Dane but I don't see them around as much. I suspect they're not prime electronics but their casing seems rugged.

[cobaka]

On the topic of storage devices, I bought several 2.5 inch HDDs. Capacity from 160GiB up to 475GiB.
Reasonable price. After that I bought some metal 2.5 inch disk caddys. These interface to the SATA drive via a small circuit card to the USB computer port.

The caddy I bought has a metal case; I figured the metal case would dissipate the heat more efficiently than plastic.
The task of fitting the drive in a plastic caddy is more simple than fitting to an extruded metal case. However, the finished result for the metal case seemed more pleasing.
The interface is stock standard USB; I took a little care to choose a drive with a lower current drain. At 570mA this is marginally over the 500mA rating for a USB supply line, but my general experience is that devices operate below the given spec. Of the drives I bought, all ran well initially. After some time one drive failed the 'badblocks' test. My guess: dropped in transit. The packing was poor. No foam. No bubble. Just two drives in a paper outer. Below you see a drive, with cable, in a drive caddy.

160GiB_HDD_in_drive_caddy.jpg (31.74 KiB) Viewed 479 times

собака
woof!

[Grey]

Make some kind of project. I have a second unused Raspberry Pi 3+, a seven-inch screen, a terabyte hard drive & a special adapter board for it. Well, a couple of speakers & an amplifier.

According to my quick estimates, this is enough for the device to work for 14 hours.
This should be enough to wait until the electrical substation is repaired if someone blows it up

And now this day has come. The Telegraph's viewers are happy as usual. But I had time to prepare like a sly fox

[mikewalsh]

@Grey :-

Please DON'T keep changing post titles to suit your own content. You're one of the biggest offenders in this respect, and there have been a LOT of complaints about this recently! It means the thread title becomes permanently changed for those who want to reply in future, and makes it much harder to find. NOT very clever.

No reason why you can't put a title heading in the post itself. It's easy enough to do, and it would be appreciated by those of us who have to keep cleaning-up behind you...

Thanks.

Mike.

[Grey]

Please DON'T keep changing post titles to suit your own content.

Hello. I was just responding to my own post for 2023. And the forum engine set the title of the post accordingly the same as in the post in 2023. All questions should be directed to the authors of phpBB and to the Administrator. This is a native feature for most forums.

[Grey]

No reason why you can't put a title heading in the post itself. It's easy enough to do, and it would be appreciated by those of us who have to keep cleaning-up behind you...

Why do you clean up such little things? If a forum user cannot understand the structure of the forum branches, then you are not responsible for this.